Facebook Improves How it Tracks Video Metrics in Page Insights

Facebook announced updates to the Video Metrics section of Page Insights that will see several improvements made to how it tracks user engagement with videos. In addition to the entire interface being redesigned, important new metrics are being made available about how much time is spent watching video content.

Prior to today’s update Page owners were able to track total view counts on videos, but that metric didn’t take into account people who viewed some portion of the video before clicking away. Now Facebook will record the total minutes viewed watching a video, which it says was the number one most requested feature.

Page owners can now track views on a more granular level with the new 10-Second Views metric, which records how many times the video was viewed to at least 10 seconds. This is an important metric for advertisers, since Facebook declared last summer advertisers will only be charged for ad views if the video was watched for longer than 10 seconds.

A new metric was added that has the potential to shake up some advertising campaigns. Within the Insights view of an individual video, you can now see the amount of people that viewed your video with the sound on or sound off. This could possibly reveal some important information about a Page’s audience.

For example, if a Page’s videos are routinely viewed with the sound off, it could likely mean their audience primarily uses Facebook at work or school — i.e., somewhere that sound cannot be turned on. If its found that a large percentage of a Page’s video viewers are the sound-off type, they may find it beneficial to adjust their ads with sub-titles to get more mileage out of them.

That’s just one example of why I find Sound-On vs. Sound-Off the most intriguing metric in today’s update. I feel we may start to see a lot more content tailored for sound-off viewers as a result.

The company says today’s updates are based on feedback from Page owners on metrics they would like to see, which indicates user feedback is taken into account when preparing these updates. The updates are available as of today in the Video Metrics section of Page Insights.